


peel the scars from off my back

by softhan



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Drunkenness, Gen, Hannibal gets talked about a lot but does not actually appear, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Reminiscing, this is sort of sad but overall not that sad? things are mostly good now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 01:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15232404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softhan/pseuds/softhan
Summary: “Today would have been my daughter’s 25th birthday.” Will picks up his glass and swirls the liquid around before swallowing some of it. “My husband is doing the same at home with our wine collection.”The man blinks. Will forgot that it’s a surprise to some people that he’s queer, but at least the man recovers well. “That’s a good reason for whiskey,” he says.Will has an interesting encounter with a stranger in a bar a few years after running off with Hannibal





	peel the scars from off my back

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a conversation with [Em](http://embulalia.tumblr.com) (who looked this over for me because she's is an angel) about Will going to a bar to get away from Hannibal and it, uh, grew legs and ran away from me. 
> 
> This is pretty much canon compliant; obviously a lot of the things Will says in here are not strictly true but this scene is written under the assumption that all canon events happened the way they happened in canon
> 
> Title is from the song [“Welcome Home” by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5KxCFL9TN4)

Will isn’t sure what drink he’s on when the man slides onto the stool next to him, which is probably a sign that it’s been too many. But he isn’t letting himself care about that tonight. He finally feels like he’s starting to relax, and that was the whole point of being here, wasn’t it? To fucking relax and not have to think about anything. He could make the walk home in his sleep anyway.

He likes this bar because it’s close to their home, and they carry his favorite whiskey. He and Hannibal come in here often enough that the staff know he’s going to say no if anyone wants to buy him a drink, and nobody minds two men getting a little handsy when they come in together. This bar isn’t as fancy as Hannibal would prefer, of course, but Will likes it. Will comes here on his own most of the time. It’s where he comes when he needs to leave. 

Tonight it’s just him and his barstool and the slightly sticky counter in front of him. Will can’t remember if the stickiness is his fault. He distantly thinks it might be. This place is usually pretty clean. 

He really can’t remember how much he’s had, and he knows there’s a reason that should be worrying him, but he can’t remember that either. He feels pretty warm, but in a nice way. Fuzzy. Fuzzy is good.

Someone is trying to talk to him, which is weird, because his glass is still half full and there’s nobody else over here—except wait, that’s right, a man sat down next to him. Will really hopes it isn’t yet another small town queer hoping that Will’s finally had enough of his marriage. He knows how people see them and it pisses him off, the way they look at Hannibal and think Will could do better than him. Will’s always had people thinking he’s pretty, and he knows he is, but so is Hannibal. And Hannibal is not an old man, no matter what that asshole last month was thinking when he tried to corner Will outside the bathroom. They all see Will as pretty and small and they never expect the right hook to the jaw. Really, punching them is a mercy. Hannibal would do much worse if any of them actually touched him.

“Are you okay?” someone asks. Oh, right. The man.

Will focuses, with some effort. Probably about Will’s age, heavier set but not taller. Hair gone mostly gray and cropped short. He doesn’t look like he’s _interested_ in Will. He looks mostly like he’s worried Will is going to pass out, or fall off his barstool, which is ridiculous. Will opens his mouth to say so before he remembers he’s only supposed to respond to the things people actually say aloud. “I’m fine, sorry,” he says. “I was just a little lost in my own head. What did you say?”

“I asked if you had a reason to be drinking alone,” the man says, nodding at Will’s wedding ring. He’s wondering if they’re fighting, or if something happened Will doesn’t want to talk to his spouse about. Mostly he’s just lonely and wants to talk to someone, because he does have a reason to be drinking alone and hasn’t had enough yet to not be bothered by it.

Will can understand that. And it might be nice to talk to someone about Abigail. He and Hannibal have really said all they’re going to be able to say about her. “Today would have been my daughter’s 25th birthday.” He picks up his glass and swirls the liquid around before swallowing some of it. “My husband is doing the same at home with our wine collection.”

The man blinks. Will forgot that it’s a surprise to some people that he’s queer, but at least the man recovers well. “That’s a good reason for whiskey,” he says.

Will nods. He agrees, and the whiskey was good when he could still taste it. “What about you?”

The man shrugs. Will realizes from the motion that he does some kind of job that leaves him hunched over a computer most of the day. He needs a taller chair at work. “It’s just that kind of day.” Will’s eyes go to the faint tan line on his ring finger, and the man sighs, knocking back the rest of his drink and waving down the bartender for another. “My ex-wife won’t let me see our son until my sister moves out of my apartment, but Celia _just_ moved out of her fucker of an ex’s place, and there’s nowhere else for her to go.”

“That’s rough,” Will says. Celia is the man’s baby sister, Will sees, and he’s angry at himself for not helping her get out of an abusive relationship sooner. He feels responsible for her even though she’s an adult, but he’s frustrated with her for not getting a job or trying to find her own place when she knows she’s preventing him from seeing his son. It is rough. Will feels exhaustion and frustration pouring off the man in waves. “I’m John,” he adds, not offering a handshake.

“Bruce,” the man says, taking a sip of his beer. “You wanna talk about it?”

Will shrugs, sighs. He leans forward to rest his arm on the bar and remembers slightly too late that it’s sticky. He can’t bring himself to care. “Her name was Abigail,” he says. “She died when she was 18.” Probably too much truth to tell a stranger, but he’s drunk and Abigail is a common enough name. The news never called her their daughter anyway, even though she was. “We blamed each other. Still kinda do, I guess. Hence the not drinking together.”

“You do this every year, then?”

“Since we got back together, yeah.” God, he really has had too much to drink. The words are just coming out of him. Bruce is interested, though, and not suspicious. He’s just looking to talk and Will’s problems are easier to think about than his own. “We broke up after. Neither of us handled it well. It took years of both of us desperately trying to move on before we figured out how to be together without her.”

“That sounds messy.” Bruce takes a long swig of beer. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost AJ though. Fuck. I can understand why you don’t want to be around each other tonight.”

“Yeah.” Will sighs with his whole body and takes another sip of his whiskey. “It really was messy. God. We both married other people and it wasn’t even a little bit fair to either of our wives. I found a woman with a son and moved as far away as I could and tried to pretend that was the family I’d always wanted. He married a colleague and tried to convince himself he’d never been in love with me in the first place.” Will gives half a laugh. “Neither of those strategies really went very well.”

“Not really the recommended reasons for marrying a woman, no.” Bruce raises his glass. “To unfortunate marriage decisions.”

Will grins and clinks glasses. He raises his to his mouth but doesn’t drink; he really needs to slow down. 

“If he had his way I’d be home tonight,” Will admits. “And I love him but, god, I can’t do this in front of him. We’ve been married for, fuck, more than three years? And I’m not angry anymore, you know? But if I stayed home I’d end up saying something I regret, and he’d get upset, and I can’t still be dealing with this tomorrow.” He sighs. “I mean, I’m probably gonna regret saying all this to you as it is. No offense.”

Bruce smiles. He isn’t offended, and he’s only an appropriate level of concerned. Will hasn’t actually fucked this up yet. He’d just leave, but it’s actually kind of nice to talk about it with someone who wasn’t there. He doesn’t have anywhere else to be but home, and Hannibal definitely hasn’t passed out yet. Last year, he was still up when Will got home at 2, although “up” was a relative term. Awake enough to slur apologies, anyway, which was too awake in Will’s opinion. The apologies are the whole fucking problem. He’s forgiven, but Will can’t just forget about it and act like it’s fine, and Hannibal can’t seem to grasp that. Will knows he’s sorry. He just isn’t ever going to be able to say “it’s okay” like Hannibal wants him to.

Bruce is looking at him expectantly. Will must have missed something again. “Sorry, what?”

“I said if you don’t want to talk about this, I can leave you alone.” It’s sincere, and a little concerned, which is sweet. Bruce is sweet. He shouldn’t be talking to someone like Will. 

“I don’t mind,” he says, surprising himself. It’s true though. “I haven’t talked about any of this in a long time. Most of the time we pretend it didn’t happen. It’s easier that way.”

“That sounds like avoidance to me,” Bruce says, tapping his fingers on the side of his glass. “But, hell, sometimes avoidance is what you’ve got.”

“Cheers to that,” Will says, although he doesn’t pick up his glass. “It’s not like we’ve never talked about it. I think we talked about it too much, for a while. At some point there’s just nothing left to say, but that doesn’t take the pain away.”

Bruce nods and takes a gulp of his beer. “I know how that goes.”

“Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if she were still alive,” Will says. He doesn’t let himself think about it often, but it doesn’t take much for him to have a firm image in his mind. “Maybe we’d be grandparents by now. God, what would that be like? Or maybe she’d still be in school, trying to get her doctorate in something. She was brilliant, and we wanted her to get an education. She hadn’t even decided where she wanted to go. She was taking a gap year; we were going to take her to Italy.”

“I’ve never been to Italy,” Bruce says. He doesn’t know what else to say, and Will really can’t blame him.

“We went anyway, after she died. It was awful, but I think that wasn’t really the fault of the country.” Will sighs. His glass is empty again even though he’s been trying not to drink it. “We broke up pretty much right after we got back. I broke up with him. I couldn’t handle it.” He spins the glass between his hands. “He couldn’t handle it either, kept talking about going back in time and trying to find a way to fix things. You can’t fix something like that, you know? It’s just broken. You learn to live with it but it doesn’t get fixed.”

“I’ve never been good with things that can’t be fixed either.” Bruce waves the bartender over and gets them both refills. “Like, my sister. She was with that guy for ten years, and now that she’s out she’s still trapped. Trapped in her own head, more than anything. She doesn’t know how to live, without him controlling her. And I can’t just watch her like that, you know? I feel like there has to be something I can _do_.”

Will nods. “Yeah. You are doing something though, aren’t you? You’re giving her a place to stay. Somewhere she can be safe. That’s important.”

“It doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like there should be some way I can fix what he broke. Or something I can say that will make her stop missing him.”

“Sometimes the best you can do is be there and let her have the space to work through it on her own.” Will can see that Bruce loves her. He’s a good brother. “She doesn’t need you to make her stop missing him. She needs you to show her that being without him is worth it.”

“She doesn’t think it is,” Bruce says, and sighs. “And I’m not in a position to show her. I’m hardly the poster child for happy life post break up.”

“How long have you been divorced?” 

“Six months.” Bruce takes a drink. “She couldn’t handle not seeing me at all during the week,” he explains. “We’d set our schedules so she was home in the morning to take AJ to school and I was home to pick him up, which was great in theory. It was great for him. But we didn’t see each other, and she needed more support than I was able to give her when we did. We fought all the time, and we just.” He sighs, drumming the fingers of his left hand against the bar. “Couldn’t make it work.”

“Yeah.” Will sighs. “I think I know what you mean. I kept trying to make things work with my wife, for too long, I think. I wouldn’t let it be a clean break, and she got hurt because of it.”

“How long were you with her?”

“A little over two years. We got married six months after we met.” Will swallows a mouthful of whiskey. “I really wanted to be able to just forget everything that had happened, and she was wonderful and beautiful and willing to let me not talk about whatever I didn’t want to talk about. I didn’t make her talk about anything either; her son got a new father and I got to go back to being a dad. It seemed perfect, for both of us.”

“I take it that didn’t go well?” Bruce isn’t judging, which Will is grateful for. He thinks he might have judged himself. He does judge himself, a little.

“Nope.” Will chuckles without humor. “I was still in love with someone else, and you can’t just replace a child. And, god, ‘I won’t make you talk about your trauma’ and ‘please don’t tell me about your trauma’ aren’t as different as I wanted to believe they were. It got to be difficult, being close to someone and feeling like I couldn’t really talk about how I felt, what I’d been through.”

“I can see that,” Bruce says. He’s wondering what Will means by trauma, because that sounds bigger than just the death of a child, but he doesn’t ask.

“And then, sort of by chance, I ran into my daughter’s father again. My old boss wanted me to come back and do some consulting for him, so I was back in town, and I saw him, and we got to talking.” Will sets his glass down and leans back a little. His arm makes a ripping noise as he unsticks it from the bar. “And he told me… he said I was family, no matter what. And then he kept finding ways to keep the conversation going. He was still hurt about everything, but he also still loved me, you know? And I realized how much I still loved him too, and I couldn’t just go home to my wife after that.”

“You said he married someone else too?”

Will waves a hand. He forgot he mentioned Bedelia at all. This story is really getting too convoluted for him to keep track of, but it’s also really nice to tell it to someone like it was a regular life that a normal person might have had. “They’d already split up by then. They weren’t even married for a year. He wasn’t as good at pretending as I was.” Both true and not true, like so much of this conversation. “So I just didn’t go back. Wrote her a letter, let her have all my stuff, ran off with my husband.”

“How’d she take that?” Bruce’s eyebrows are in his hair, which is fair. It’s a little ridiculous, him talking about being old enough to be a grandfather and then about running away with his boyfriend, but the last decade of Will’s life has been nothing if not eventful. His thirty year old self would have his eyebrows raised too. 

“Poorly.” Will laughs and picks up his glass again, draining what’s left. “She was pissed as hell, honestly. I never get to see her son again, which… I regret coming into his life and then leaving it again like that. But it’s really for the best. My husband doesn’t like her any more than she likes him.”

“I can imagine. Sounds like you’ve got plenty of reason to drink.” Bruce shakes his head. “Jesus. My life is boring as hell compared to that.”

Will laughs a little too long at that, but it can probably be blamed on the alcohol. “You don’t know the half of it. Sorry to ramble so much about it, by the way. I don’t get much chance to talk about this shit.”

“Sounds like you needed it,” Bruce says, and goes to clap Will on the shoulder.

Will reacts instinctively, throwing himself back in what—sober—would have been a graceful dodge. He’s drunk enough that he falls backwards off the stool and narrowly avoids bashing his head on the floor.

“Whoa!” Bruce says, holding up his hands to show he’s not a threat. “Christ. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Fuck. Sorry.” Will sits up on the floor and checks himself for bruises. He’d rather not explain this to Hannibal, but if he’s marked he’ll have to, lest Hannibal draw his own conclusions. “Uh, please don’t touch me. Sorry.”

“So no hand up, then, either.”

“Yeah.” Will grabs the edge of the stool and uses it to pull himself up. Fortunately it’s the kind that’s attached to the ground, so he didn’t topple it over when he fell. “Sorry. My husband is weird about me coming home smelling like other people.” Which is a weird as fuck thing to say. God, he’s too drunk for this. His ability to manage this conversation is really slipping away. 

Bruce’s eyebrows are even higher than they were before. “Pretty sure most of what you’re gonna smell like is booze.”

“Trust me,” Will says, because apparently he is incapable of shutting up tonight, “he’d smell you on me and that wouldn’t be good for anyone.”

Bruce goes from confused to concerned faster than Will can process it. And not just casual concern, either. Fuck. Will can see him reevaluating their entire discussion, looking for hints at abuse, and honestly Will has no idea if any were in there. Hannibal certainly has done some fucked up shit to him. “What do you mean by that?”

 _I mean he’d kill you for laying a hand on me, and I’d have to deal with the guilt from that_ , Will thinks, but, blessedly, manages not to say. “It’s not like that,” he says. Hopefully Bruce’s line of thinking would have been obvious to anyone. “I just generally don’t like being touched, and I’m small and queer and some guys get the wrong idea.”

“And he gets pissed at you for that?” Bruce sounds ready to charge into Will’s home and give his shitty husband a beating, which would be entertaining, but Will actually likes Bruce. He’s a good guy.

“No, he doesn’t. He just gets pissed at them, and wants to go find them and fight them, and I’d just. Rather not deal with that.” Will sighs. Hannibal is exhausting sometimes. Explaining Hannibal is exhausting all the time. “He knows I can take care of myself, but it pisses him off that I have to. He hates people who disrespect me.”

“Forgive me if I overstep,” Bruce says. “But it doesn’t sound like _he_ respects you. If he’s not letting you—”

Will interrupts him by laughing, way too loud and too sharp. “Fuck, he’d let me do _anything_. You really don’t need to worry. I could sleep with you and he’d welcome me home with open arms. He’d be devastated, but he’s not gonna do shit to me.” It’s really Bruce that would be in danger in all of this, but Will can’t really say that any more explicitly than he already has. “It just bothers him when I smell like other people, so I try to avoid it when I can.”

“You threw yourself off a stool to avoid it.” Bruce still seems a little skeptical.

“You have any idea how many of these I’ve had?” Will waves his glass, which magically has liquid in it again. “I don’t. I’m more surprised I got back up on the stool.”

“Fair enough.” Bruce looks into his glass. “But it isn’t just that. You seem… resigned about your whole relationship.”

“Do I?” Will doesn’t remember half the things he’s said, and he has no clue what his face has been doing. 

Bruce nods. “I know it’s none of my business, but listen. Are you happy? Does he make you happy? That’s what I want to know.”

Will stares at his whiskey for inspiration. Nobody’s asked him that question so honestly for awhile, and god, he sure hasn’t been happy tonight. He has so much to be unhappy about. But he thinks about Hannibal, and the life they’ve built together. Their house and their dogs. All the weird shit in the kitchen that Hannibal uses to make delicious meals out of the shitty people they kill. The smiles and the laughter, and the quiet intimacy of being with someone who knows you, heart and soul. His eyes start to tear up, and he blinks, hard. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Fuck, he makes me so happy. Happier than I ever thought I could be.”

Bruce’s face relaxes, and he smiles. “Good.”

“Thanks for reminding me.” Will shoves his glass away and puts his hands on his thighs. “God, I love him so much. I should go home.”

“I imagine he’d appreciate that.” Bruce is still smiling. He feels better, to have helped someone else.

“Yeah. Good luck with your sister and shit. I hope your ex comes around. Sorry I wasn’t more help.”

“I don’t mind,” Bruce says. “You needed to talk.”

“I guess I did.” Will sighs, and then a thought hits him. “Hey, take my number. You should come over for dinner sometime; my husband is a great cook. And I really appreciate you hearing me out. He’ll want to meet you, to thank you for getting me home before midnight.”

Bruce blinks in surprise. “Sure, thank you. You really don’t owe me anything.”

Will scrawls his number on a napkin and hands it to him. “I know. But we like having people over, and he’ll appreciate the excuse to do something fancy for dinner. Just, text me in the morning if you want to. No pressure. I probably won’t even remember I asked you if you decide against it.”

“Thanks,” Bruce says. “Are you okay to get yourself home?”

Will stands up, and his legs hold. Everything is a little wobbly, but it’s only half a mile and he knows the walk by heart. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. We live close. Thanks for being worried about me.”

“Of course,” Bruce says.

Will walks out the door and heads for home.

**Author's Note:**

> Bruce is a good guy and not going to get eaten, please don't speculate in that direction as it makes me very uncomfortable. That said if there's interest I'd maybe be willing to write a sequel in this universe coming back to this OC? No promises though
> 
> Comments are love! You can also find me on [tumblr](http://softwillgraham.tumblr.com)


End file.
